120 grain eldm oal issue

[BluntForceTrauma]

While I'm thinking of it, please remember how the compound throat works. Right at the case mouth the rifling starts with a 0.5 degree angle for the first 0.155 (per SAAMI drawing). This gives what Bill Alexander (its designer) calls a "kiss" to the bullet. It adds only about 800 psi pressure. This design tricks the bullet into thinking, as it were, that it is into the lands but it is not. There might be slight marks on the bullet — within that first 0.155 from the case mouth — when extracted again, but this is not the same as being jammed into the lands. (Both the .30-06 and .270 Winchester SAAMI drawings show a similar throat, where the rifling angle starts right at the case mouth with no "freebore.")

After that first shallow 0.5 degree angle, the throat transitions to a standard 1.5 degree angle until the full height of the rifling is reached.

Most 6.5 Grendel cartridges — loaded to an OAL of 2.260 — when pressed into a SAAMI chamber with a finger should fall out from gravity when the muzzle is tilted up. If a round does not fall out (some Hornady factory rounds do this), lightly thumping the breech end of the barrel on the table a bit should cause the cartridge to fall out due to inertia. This is OK.

What is NOT OK is if the bullet is truly jammed into the lands — even at 2.260 OAL — and will NOT EXTRACT without the bullet sticking in the rifling and being pulled out of the case or will NOT EXTRACT at all.